I finally installed an ad blocker a couple of years back, after two decades of browsing without. It had become too much for me to cope with. The popups that took advantage of me clicking to focus on their page to get past my popup blocker, the ads with sound that didn't start muted, the overlay ads that blocked out the whole page until acknowledged, etc. This doesn't even begin to address the privacy concerns. I spent too much time being angry at nameless faceless advertisers and the asshole coders who serve them.
I never liked advertising, but I usually liked the sites I was visiting and wanted to support them, so I didn't kill the ads. Even now, I let a small number of sites serve me ads, if they have shown themselves to be responsible and respectful of my attention. reddit is one of the very few, for example, because they almost never serve a really obnoxious ad.
And, of course, I have never heeded the alligator tears of the online marketing industry (or any other marketing industry...physical junk mail producers can rot in hell). I respect the desire of websites to support their business. But, I'm not obligated to accept the method by which they want to do it, if it includes behavior that I consider unethical or just annoying.
I didn't use adblockers for years, but there was a point where I felt like advertisers had just broken down the mutually-understood norms that made online advertising acceptable. So I wrote an angry rant (http://supox.dingis-west.com/asshole.html) and installed adblockers on everything I could.
Life has been much better with adblock. I turn it off on sites that I know don't use abusive advertising practices, but it's strictly opt-in at this point.
I still don't use an ad blocker. I know all the arguments for ad blocking and I agree with many of them. I know what difference it makes in terms of performance and annoyance.
But I just can't bring myself to indiscriminately block all ads, knowing how important they are as a funding source for the websites I use.
There's only one thing that destroys privacy even more thoroughly than ad targeting: payment.
By and large, we don't especially feel the need to block ads that aren't interfering with us. Back when Google's ad business was fairly new, they did simple text ads that stayed out of the way, and they made plenty of money on it.
If that was what the vast majority of ads were today, I probably wouldn't even bother with an adblocker.
But these days there are pop-ups, and pop-overs, and pop-unders, and autoplaying videos that follow me as I scroll the page (and which, on mobile, hide about 1/3 of the content I'm there to see).
And even if I could deal with those annoyances, there are vast swathes of ad networks today that need to be avoided at all costs, because they host drive-by downloads, page redirects, and every other kind of spam, scam, and malware you can imagine.
We didn't start this war. The ad industry did. If they had been content to make a decent profit while enabling other websites to do the same, we wouldn't be in this mess. But they just had to try and squeeze every last drop of attention and money out of us.
So, we will fight for a right to block ads. And if giant chunks of the web end up being financially unsustainable because the ad business collapses entirely, that is not on us.
I don't like the ads that pop into my face like someone threw a flier in my face.
Ads have always had their respective places on websites, but lately the aggressiveness of advertisement is out of control and those are the ones I block. When a website is supposed to be user friendly but it has a lot of ads in uncomfortable zones then I tell myself that the website does not deserve another user and I stop visiting.
I don't have any moral problem with ads and companies need to make money so I don't have an adblocker and I just don't visit sites with obnoxious ads. 90% of the sites I visit (i.e. google, facebook, stackoverflow, reddit, hackernews, xkcd, netflix, etc...) don't have annoying ads.
Oddly enough the only times I have really regretted turning off my ad blocker is when I'm watching videos where an unskippable ad longer than 10 seconds comes up or I go to some news site (which seems to 3/4 of the time have some full page popup or autoplaying video).
Web site owners brought the wrath of ad blockers upon themselves.
If ads were limited to a simple image, MAYBE a non-obtrusive animated GIF, it'd be fine. Honestly, I thought Project Wonderful[0]'s ads were fine and even had an exception in my blocker for them.
But no, advertising networks allow advertisements to run JavaScript, auto-playing videos with sound, and create malvertising that hijacks my browser and even attempts to install malware or exploit browser vulnerabilities.
In short, fuck 'em. If your business isn't viable without being hostile to your users, then it isn't viable.
And it only gets worse with time. Over the past decade, I went from no adblock, to a blacklist, to a whitelist, and finally to just blocking everything except a very very short list of sites I consider trusted (Reddit being one of them) that I no longer update. If a site doesn't let me view content without ads, I don't visit it. I have yet to run into a situation where the content was worth the exposure to risk and the financial cost of ads (mobile data caps).
I only installed Adblock about a year ago, after years of resistance. I'm happy to support the sites I visit regularly...but, when the trust I put in those sites is betrayed repeatedly with intrusive, disruptive and distracting ads, I get tired of it, and lose any sense of loyalty. If your site plays an ad with sound enabled on load you're no longer worth any concern from me.
I whitelist pages I trust not to be abusive (reddit mostly). But, otherwise I don't care to serve an abusers interests any longer. If a site doesn't respect basic decency with their ads, I will impose that decency on them with an ad block tool.
I've started to think about it differently. I no longer use any ad blockers.
I actually want to experience the web (and its decline) the way it is, to take it all in, feel the pain and strengthen my patience in the process.
Also, when I visit a website that is truly obnoxious with its ads, I simply leave immediately and never go there. You build your own filter of bad actors, behaviors, and concrete sites. You don't need to block everyone, you simply walk away from abusers. You want to take notice of improper behavior before consciously and deliberately boycotting it.
I disable my adblocking for sites that use reasonable ads.
If I go to a site and am bombarded with pop ups, auto playing video ads, etc., then yeah why wouldn't I block them? With the malware and tracking that is often injected into ads I have no problem using my adblocker at all times and disabling it for pages that ask politely.
I'm happy to click on ads on sites that I frequent and would like to support. I think there's absolutely a balance here, and for many years the advertising industry has abused their stay.
I feel similar with using adblockers. There's lots of ads and I hate them, but because I'm technically inclined I can block them. But if lots of people do this, and they do, the cat and mouse game escalates to a point where I cannot do it anymore.
I agree. It seems like adblockers and intrusive and unethical advertising are creating almost a negative feedback loop on the internet: the more intrusive and annoying the ads, the more people use adblockers, and the more people use adblockers, the more intrusive and annoying the ads become, because they have to make up the revenue.
The only ones in a position to break this cycle is the browsers, and I welcome any attempt to try and create a more healthy environment for ads to exist in. It would be a great service for both users and the industry.
So I got my start in ad based websites. If it wasn't for ads, I would have never really gotten into what we do. I'd have done something away from the internet because I never grew up with a computer and wasn't fascinated by them as a young child.
So because of that, I had always been in favor of ads. Not as in I'd plaster my site with ads, but if a site displayed ads, I would endure them because if I wanted the content that's the trade off. Otherwise I could find similar content somewhere else.
Then The Verge's article about slow browsing came about, and the retorting articles about things and I realized ads have gone way to fucking far.
17 years I have been online. 17 years I had never installed an ad blocking plugin or anything. Last month I installed uBlock Origin and turned it into blacklist mode.
I still feel sites who have ads in place that aren't intrusive and annoying deserve to be displayed, but sites like The Verge, or CNN or anything like that which blast you with 300 requests where 90% of them are ads. Or sites where ads become more important than the content; These sites get instant ad blocking enabled for them.
This is why I personally don't like using an ad-blocker.
If I have ads blocked, then I'm blind to the problems that the average internet user faces. I end up viewing, reading, tweeting, talking about sites that are flat out reader-abusive in their advertising. As a web developer, my sense of the state of the internet is warped.
With ads turned on, I end up avoiding those sites and seeking quieter places. I have a better understanding of what normal people see.
Adblockers have been around for more than 20 years. It's only in the last few years that they've started seriously cutting into advertisers' business.
There's a reason for that. Most people don't care enough about ads to bother installing an adblocker. It's intrusive, disruptive ads that drive them to do that. It wouldn't have come to this if site owners had taken responsibility for the content of their advertising.
And, unfortunately, most people don't bother to change their adblocker's default settings (and raise holy hell if the default settings allow non-intrusive ads), so the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater. Bad actors ruin the funding model for everyone.
How did we ever get to the point where letting anyone slap any ads they want over your content seemed like a good idea? Imagine a newspaper or a TV channel running porn ads and saying "sorry, we don't control the content of our ads." They'd be crucified.
I use an ad blocker solely to block popups that interfere with my reading. So many sites popup to ask for your email once you scroll far enough to move the mouse to leave, and I simply don't want to be on email lists. I'm totally fine with other ads and I'm not concerned I've been brainwashed.
If I didn't have to worry about malicious ads, pop up advertisements, video ads that automatically play, and obnoxious ads then I probably wouldn't use AdBlock. But since advertisements are nothing but obnoxious then it makes it hard for me to change my mind...
Ads didn't bother me until they started to force me to watch annoying video ads that interrupt my flow. Internet is not a bloody television, I don't like to be interrupted, it is incredibly irritating. What made the matter worse, the ads they showed were local companies or for products I actually cared and as such it did damage to the advertisers - and this was the main reason why I started using an ad blocker - to stop advertisers to damage themselves.
Honestly, I won't use an ad-blocker if the ads weren't so creepily targeted and so annoyingly pervasive. Hell, I don't even mind looking and clicking on some ads if they are not intrusively shoved down my throat.
I never liked advertising, but I usually liked the sites I was visiting and wanted to support them, so I didn't kill the ads. Even now, I let a small number of sites serve me ads, if they have shown themselves to be responsible and respectful of my attention. reddit is one of the very few, for example, because they almost never serve a really obnoxious ad.
And, of course, I have never heeded the alligator tears of the online marketing industry (or any other marketing industry...physical junk mail producers can rot in hell). I respect the desire of websites to support their business. But, I'm not obligated to accept the method by which they want to do it, if it includes behavior that I consider unethical or just annoying.
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